The materials described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
As common practice, biological samples used to prepare nucleic acid libraries for downstream analyses are homogeneously processed according to standardized assay protocols without regard to customized procedures for each sample. An important quality control (QC) measurement is nucleic acid concentration of nucleic acid libraries since performance of many modern nucleic acid analysis technologies is dependent on the nucleic acid concentration of input nucleic acids. Since such downstream analyses typically use expensive reagents and incur significant costs to perform, samples not meeting nucleic acid concentration requirements and/or other QC measurements are simply discarded on the assumption that the sample preparation was intrinsically unsuitable for the desired application.
For example, in next-generation sequencing (NGS) applications, also known as high-throughput sequencing, it is often desirable but logistically challenging to prepare nucleic acid libraries with substantially uniform DNA molar concentrations. This problem often arises in the preparation of nucleic acid libraries constructed from a plurality of heterogeneous biological samples, particularly when a desirable source biological sample is disproportionately underrepresented. This problem additionally arises when a target nucleic acid molecule is a relatively rarer and/or more unstable nucleic acid species when compared to even other nucleic acids that are derived from the same biological sample.